Ramona Ausubel - A Guide to Being Born - Stories

“I just want to have some sex with you,” he said. “I won’t hurt you if you have some sex with me.” She was barely breathing, the trees were barely breathing, and the turned earth from their footsteps smelled cold. Hazel thought about running or screaming or kicking, but she just looked up at him and said, “Please. Wait. Help.”

He pulled her down to the ground and he kissed her neck. He undid pants and pants. His breath, strong and bitter with alcohol, was boiling water on her face. His mouth was right up next to her mouth but he didn’t kiss her, just breathed into her. She turned her head but he followed. She could not avoid his lungy air. His weight was everywhere. Two words kept pinging in her mind, though she did not know what they meant. And yet, and yet, and yet.

A TINY WHITE SPINE began to knit itself inside Hazel. Now it was just a matter of growing. Hazel sat on the closed toilet next to a little plastic spear with a bright blue plus sign on one end. She put her hands in her hair, tried to hold her head up.

She thought of the men that could have created this. “How could you be a real living thing?” she asked her growing baby. “How could you be a person?” She dreamed that night, and for all the nights of summer, of a ball of light in her belly. A glowing knot of illuminated strands, heat breaking away from it, warming her from the inside out. Then it grew fur, but still shone. Pretty soon she saw its claws and its teeth, long and yellow. It had no eyes, just blindly scratched around sniffing her warm cave. She did not know if this creature was here to be her friend or to punish her.

“MOTHER,” Hazel said in the kitchen in early fall where the difficult process of roasting a duck was under way. Hazel’s mother was holding it by the neck over a large pan, searing.

“Yes, darling,” her mother said.

“I need to tell you something.”

“My wallet is in the front hall. I, for one, would like to see you in a pair of decent shoes.”

“I am very pregnant.” Hazel’s fear had so far been sitting, quietly twirling his cane and reading how-to manuals, waiting for Hazel to acknowledge him there.

The duck dropped to the pan.

Hazel omitted Johnny and the 7-11 from her story. She omitted her own fault from the story, she omitted any possibility of a father. Hazel’s mother looked up at her with every kind of lost in her eyes. She lifted up the baggy sweatshirt Hazel had on and looked at her belly and started to cry. “Who was he? How could he do that to you?” And then quickly, “ I will take care of everything .” The cane twirler twirled his cane and tapped his shiny shoes together. He winked at Hazel from under a top hat, saying with his big eyes, There is so much now that you have to hold on to.

Hazel’s mother began her crusade. The police came and took a description, drew a man who looked nothing like anyone Hazel had ever seen. The drawing was pinned to each lamppost in town until it rained and the posters shredded and bled, leaving torn bits of paper all over the sidewalk. A women’s self-defense class got started up at the gym. The mayor proposed a citywide emergency phone system in Hazel’s name. But Hazel herself was not meant to benefit from any of these activities. Too late now for self-defense, too late to find a bright yellow phone with a direct line to the police. School started back up and she went, stared at and eyed and gossiped about, and then she walked home, where her sisters came over in shifts, bringing her movies and trays of Poor-Hazel Cookies.

FOR THE TOWN, in a way, it was exciting to have an Illegitimate Bastard Baby from a Rape, because people had plenty to talk about and plenty of sympathy to dispatch. People whispered in the grocery store aisles, “Did you hear about that poor Whiting girl behind the church? And to think the Lord was right next door. I’m going to drop off a casserole later.”

If you could have lopped off all the pointed roofs of all the yellow-white houses and watched from above, you would have seen the top of a blond head in each kitchen, pulling hot pans out of the oven, steam rising off meat loaves and lasagnas, the counter covered in empty tuna cans, the severed heads of zucchini lying in heaps. A line of station wagons streamed past the Whitings’, reheatables meant to make their way from Ford and Dodge right into the stomachs of the grieving. Hazel’s mother stopped answering their door after a while. Their freezer was full, their refrigerator and mini garage refrigerator were full. Casserole dishes started to pile up on the front steps. Baked ziti baked again in the sun. Beth Berther, who could not cook even one thing, left a grocery-store cake—chocolate with chocolate frosting and the word Condolences! scrawled in orange cursive on top.

People also started to deliver diaper bags and bouncy swings and little hats made to look like various vegetables. Hazel wrote thank-you notes and felt bad that her strange fur baby would be unable to wear the woolen gifts. She saved them in a box under her bed, the bed where she stayed most of the time when she was not in school. Where she was when her mother came in every morning with lemon tea and a biscuit. Where her mother sat, her big reddish-blond hair full of light, singing “Go Tell It on the Mountain” until the breakfast tray was empty and she’d leave singing “Jesus Christ is born , ” as she closed the door behind her.

BY MONTH SIX, the glowing ball-baby had turned itself into a large bird of prey. It spread and curled its wings. Hazel felt them strong and tickling. The nest it was building was a round of borrowed organs, her small intestine twisted up in a pink knot, the bird’s sharp claws resting in the center. Then the bird started to lay eggs, white and the size of a fist. Hazel bought yarn and began to knit three-pronged booties, which she had to invent a pattern for. She planned sweaters with wing holes. She hummed the blues.

Soon Hazel felt the eggs starting to hatch. They cracked and tiny beaks worked to break the surface of the shell, milky eyes and wet feathers emerging into the warm pinkness. The mother bird cuddled them under her wings. She fed them Hazel’s digested meals through her beak. The babies twittered and grew. There were too many though, and as their bodies got larger they couldn’t move anymore. They were packed in, their famously good eyes useless now, pressed up against the walls of the cave.

Meanwhile, school was exactly as boring as it had always been. Hazel was smiled at more because she was frowned at more. “My mother says God is glad you are keeping the innocent baby,” a senior said to Hazel at her locker. “And I don’t agree that being raped makes you a slut.” The girl handed her a piece of notebook paper with a list of names on it. In the girl column: Grace, Honor, Constance, Mary, Faith. And in the boy column: Peter, Adam, David, Axl Rose.

Hazel thought about a giant bird of prey with the name Constance.

The birds couldn’t open their womb-smashed beaks to eat and they began to starve to death. Hazel could feel them getting weaker. They made no noise; they didn’t twitch or flutter. One morning she woke up and knew they were dead. Knew their bodies had given up and were now just a mess of needle-bones and feathers. Hazel cried in the shower while she washed herself with Dove. For weeks she could feel the empty weight of them in her. She tucked the booties in the back of her underwear drawer. Through the end of fall and into winter, the avian bodies stayed. Snow was outside on the ground and storms were inside Hazel as the bodies started to flake like ash, layer after layer turned gray and fell. The pile was frozen inside the windless space.